Mr Diagonal‘s latest album is a curious thing, coming on like the strange musical of a landlocked dreamer forever yearning for the tropical shores of the Pacific. On the cover, he sits clutching a six-string ukulele, straw hat and cut-offs, but appears to be in a launderette or somewhere equally mundane, with a faraway look in his eye and a bottle of rum by his side.
His conversational tones and idiosyncratic instrumentation, plus a desire for covering as many styles as humanly possible, makes for a meandering, adventurous and whimsical journey on North Pacific. From the sandy strum, hazy keyboards and gently undulating drift of opener “Bannerghatta”‘s “feline doctor, human zoo” all the way to the final track’s imagery of thousands of sunset postcards, Mr Diagonal sends that desired ideal vista back in two-dimensional form over a sashaying kind of seaside rhythm.
On the journey, we pass through the piano ballad of “Serendipity House” where “monkeys raid the mango trees” and watch as the piano turns melancholy in “Indian Ocean” where we learn it is “older then the South China Sea / Older then the Streets of Tartary”. This dreamlike descriptive skill runs all through the album in hand with the kind of delivery which is conversational but dreamy, as if he is explaining something to somebody, but not waiting nor interested in a response from anyone. There aren’t many albums that move sweetly from Tom Waits-y rolling piano blues, through ’80s yacht-funk to rim shot-filled rumba rhythms without even breaking a sweat; but it sure happens here. If you want toy piano and sea-sound lullabies, sweeping strings over a strummed ukulele and swannee whistle, step this way. In fact, the ukulele appears and disappears, and when it pops up in “Red Lighthouse” accompanied by blustering bass and drums, it is soon swamped by the unlikely but somehow fitting scorching guitar solo.The musical feel comes across through the general tempo and the use here and there of lachrymose strings; the pictures painted are of the desire for something unexpected, a change from the humdrum, the classic tale of an unfulfilled dream that just could happen and by the end probably will. North Pacific‘s lovingly produced sunset sketches do just that, proving that everything can be attained if we just make it happen.
-Mr Olivetti-
